Houdini 11 escapes from Side Effects Software

Houdini isn't the household name that Max and LightWave are, but it's a staple …

On Tuesday, Toronto's Side Effects software announced the 11th release of its high-end animation package Houdini. If you clicked to read about Harry Houdini's 11th escape, we're sorry—Houdini is not the household name that Max and LightWave are, but it has become a staple of high-end 3D in film and increasingly in game production.

Houdini's specialty is procedural effects, and the crumbling buildings of Killzone 2 and Spiderman 3's Birth of Sandman sequence are a couple examples of the power of this program, out of the box. This isn't a program that relies on plug-ins to make it useful—but it's always demanded input via scripting and other building block schemes, which gives it a steep learning curve. Version 11 adds more turn-key elements like a simpler one-size-fits-all material model and built-in Voronoi mesh destruction.

The full feature list for version 11 includes

User Interface

New, bezier-style connectors in the network editors

New tool palette in the network editor offers a gallery of nodes which can be dragged into the network.

Seamless integration of particles into dynamics networks and dynamics into geometry networks. This makes it easier to focus simulations on particular networks instead of simulating everything at the same time.

Enhancements to bundles to strengthen light-linking workflow

Z-up support

Vertex Normals

Support for vertex normals in OpenGL

Network Rendering

Network-distributed IPR

HQueue for Windows and Mac

Gold release of Houdini Cloud rendering tools

Volumes

Support for multi-resolution volumes with merging, feathering and surfacing tools

VEX Volume Procedural

Volume Quality setting in viewport

Camera frustum volumes with tapering values.

Higher quality viewport visualization of volumes

Texturing

Support for Disney's "Ptex" format

Point clouds

New point cloud surfacer with adaptive controls (generates a better surface than the existing particle fluid surfacer; more applicable to games)

At $6,695 for the Master version, Houdini 11 is priced well out of the reach of most consumers, but there is an Apprentice version that's available for free. Anyone looking for Hollywood-level animation software, who doesn't mind a watermark and resolution limit on their final renders, can get their feet wet.